Another Dev's Two Cents

Another Dev's Two Cents

Latest — 20 Apr 2026

5 projects to build your AI engineering competency

I've spent the last 2 years building and interviewing candidates for AI Engineering roles. So I've been fortunate enough to watch the career track evolve from being a fringe amorphous role fueled by hype to a growing discipline in and of itself. AI Engineering as a

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Just because it's work shaped doesn't make it productive

AI Assisted/Agentic programming are pretty common place at this point. The growing sentiment seems to be that if you can't find some sort of benefit in your workflow, it's more of a skill issue than a problem with the tools. Whether you believe this to

On AI and Learning

Over the weekend, I had some interesting discussions about the impacts AI on developer growth and skill atrophy. Much of that discussion was inspired by Mo Bitar's video on the subject. Within my small group, we couldn't come to a consensus on its impacts. We all

GMKTec Evo-X2 Ryzen AI Max 395+ Benchmarks

I recently got my hands on a GMKTec Evo X2 for local model inference. Here's my hardware details nish@gmktec-evo-x2:~$ sudo lshw -short H/W path Device Class Description ========================================================= system NucBox_EVO-X2 (EVO-X2-001) /0 bus GMKtec /0/0 memory 64KiB BIOS /0/b memory 1280KiB L1 cach

On the DORA 2025 AI Report - AI Adoption and use

The DORA State of AI Assisted Software Development report came out recently. It's a massive 142 page report that details analysis done by the DORA team. It captures trends and observations covering a 5000 participant study that focuses on AI Adoption and tool use in the Software industry.

Notes on OpenAI's AppSDK

OpenAI's dev day was today. While I wrote up a short summary of what was announced on bluesky, one of the major announcements was the AppSDK for ChatGPT. It looks like OpenAI plans to position ChatGPT as a platform for the future not unlike the Google Play and

Vector Norms

A Norm of a vector \(\vec{v}\) describes the magnitude or size of a vector. It is usually denoted as \(||\vec{v}||\). There are a few common norms worth discussing. Eucledian Norm (L2 Norm) Let's consider a vector v = [3, 4] we can calculate the Eucledean norm as,

Notes on - Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?

A fantastic deep dive into the seahorse emoji phenomena[1] was recently published by Theia[2]. It's engaging, well presented and worth reading. The post presents a case using meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. However I wanted to verify this behavior with smaller models which unsurprisingly fail the challenge as

How LLM Structured Decoding works

Last week I happened to be in a discussion that involved getting an LLM to generate JSON reliably. A major frustration expressed was that no matter how much they tried the model would often fail to follow instructions during generation. I pointed out that most major vendors support some variant

Notes on the phi-4-reasoning Technical Paper

Phi-4 Reasoning Microsoft recently released the phi-4 reasoning model as well as its technical report. They explore using supervised finetuning as well as synthetic dataset curation to train phi-4 a 14B parameter model to compete with and often outperform significanly larger models such as DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B. We present Phi-4-reasoning, a 14-billion